<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'New ideas for <code>minequest</code>',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2017/09/30.jpg" alt="A beautiful gate" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		I didn&apos;t get as much coursework done as I wanted to.
		During the period of time I was motivated, which lasted about two hours, the school website was having issues and wouldn&apos;t let me load pages.
		After that, I gave up and lost my motivation, but then the site started loading.
		Oh well, I should have time tomorrow.
	</p>
	<p>
		After work, I headed to the store for some things I needed: nails, wrapping paper, a greeting card, a needle, and some black thread.
		Outside the store, I saw my bike still there, but now, the seat&apos;s turned around backward.
		I think someone tried to jack my bike seat!
		I&apos;m running out of time to get my bike back before it gets stolen, but I still can&apos;t get the lock to open and it&apos;d look too shady for me to cut at the lock at night.
		I have to wait until I have time in the day, which won&apos;t be for a couple of days.
	</p>
	<p>
		With the nails, I&apos;ve now hung up the things I had hung in the living room before I vacated it: my pride flag and my bulletin board.
		I&apos;ll repair my tee-shirt with the needle and thread when I have time.
		My mother&apos;s birthday is in a couple days, and I&apos;ve had a gift for her for months, but I haven&apos;t yet been able to wrap it.
		I&apos;ll probably need to do that tomorrow, as I&apos;ll need to have it ready to bring over the next day.
	</p>
	<p>
		When I was working on <code>minequest</code>, I had a had a particular problem I wanted to address, but wasn&apos;t sure how to actually do so.
		Basically, I didn&apos;t want players gaming the system to essentially have access to all the power-ups at once.
		Players can swap out bonuses at will, so by swapping to whatever&apos;s needed at the time with no transitional &quot;no power&quot; period, all a player has to do is keep a bunch of items in their inventory at all times and change powers as desired.
		For example, a power that heals the player when you click a button in the menu isn&apos;t needed between uses.
		A player can swap it in when injured, heal, then swap it right back out.
		That defeats the purpose of needing to pick your powers, as you don&apos;t need much strategy to do so; you simply pick <strong>*all*</strong> the powers.
		To an extent, I want players to be able to switch powers when they like though.
		There are some powers that need to store data between uses, such as the (at least) two that store warp points for the player.
		Powerful bonuses such as these lose their data when swapped out, so the player would lose their warp points if they swapped that out even momentarily, though for the time being, no penalty is issued for swapping out the healing bonuses between uses.
		However, a second layer of this system gaming is something I&apos;d even more like to avoid.
		Specifically, a player is able to choose their eight power-up slot types, and I don&apos;t want those types switched out all willy-nilly.
		I don&apos;t want players to be locked into a particular combination forever, but I do feel that careful thought when choosing should be well-advised.
		Reconfiguring the power-up slots has already been planned to require disabling all bonuses, even those of slots you don&apos;t intend to reconfigure.
		This alone should make players that use bonuses such as the warp points think twice before deciding to give up their current configuration.
		However, I&apos;ve come up with another idea that should help in this as well.
		Bonus slots will have an energy level.
		Something, likely the mining of countable nodes, will cause the power level of every slot to rise, up to a maximum determined by the number of stacks of the item represented by that slot that you&apos;ve mined.
		Instead of the callbacks for item bonuses being told the level of the bonus you have based on the number of items mined, they&apos;ll be told the item&apos;s power level and be given a chance to lower that level.
		I&apos;d had a bonus that kept track of its own power level, with a maximum based on the number of stacks you&apos;ve mined, while also using the stack count directly.
		If you&apos;d mined X stacks of the item, you could heal by X HP X times.
		This new system will totally mess with that, so each time you use it, the amount of health you gain will drop, but I think it&apos;ll actually be a better system.
		Anyway, most power-ups will likely either use the number as a uses-left count <strong>*or*</strong> as a strength multiplier; most probably won&apos;t use it for both at once, though some obviously will.
		When you reconfigure your slots, this count will have to be reset to zero, as you may have swapped in slot types that haven&apos;t been charged, so reconfiguring the slot types will effectively nullify the strength of all your bonuses for a time.
		No such penalty will be issued for swapping out bonuses in a given slot without switching slot types though.
		If a player wants to load up their inventory with bonus items, it&apos;ll cut down on their usable inventory space, so that&apos;s penalty enough for trying to game the system that way.
		In fact, I think I won&apos;t even consider that a gaming of the system at all.
		Likewise, a healing bonus, for example, likely drains the power of the slot a bit.
		Swapping it in and using it will lessen the effect of your main bonus that you usually use for that slot, but just temporarily.
		Heavy farmers and heavy miners will be able to recharge quickly, as harvesting countable nodes is the key to recharging.
		These are the same people that are rewarded for their efforts with more power for their bonuses, as well.
		If you&apos;re in the business of resource production, swapping bonuses and trying something new won&apos;t hurt you as badly, which is sort of the intended point.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve also decided to focus my planning efforts on the bonuses granted by the items directly dropped by the countable nodes, not just whatever bonuses I think I have a better shot of figuring out at the time.
		If I can figure out the ten base bonuses, I can put out a proof of concept.
		I can gauge interest in the mod, but more importantly, I can solicit ideas for other bonuses.
		I&apos;ll keep the planned bonuses a secret in case someone comes up with something better than I did, and so I can shift things around and take (for example) three different ideas for the same item and use them with three different items.
		However, the base ten bonuses will be known straight away so people can try them out and see how they like the general idea.
		I think this plan is also helping me figure out what to do with the base items.
		To make this proof of concept work the way I want it too, I&apos;m needing to set the base bonuses to represent the general theme I feel each bonus slot has, based on what I think its main bonuses are.
		At the same time, I can&apos;t have these base items take on the main bonuses themselves.
		That is, except in the case of flint, as that slot can only take two different items and I feel the base item has the main bonus already.
		I&apos;ve got ideas for four of the ten base items, but I still need to think about the other six some more.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
